6 Nick Claussen blog posts are equal to 24 regular posts!
Every once in a while, a word looks funny to me because the spelling seems weird, it is used in different ways or if I just focus on it for a moment, it seems like a strange word.
Our judges say that this happens to nearly everyone, so they helped me put together this list of the Top 5 Words That Look Funny To Me Right Now. Continue reading “Top 5 Words That Look Funny To Me Right Now”
I am often confused about how to capitalize titles.
I understand the AP Style rules for when to italicize titles or put them in quotes, but the actual guidelines for which words to capitalize have always confused me. Continue reading “Rules for Capitalizing the Titles Seem Confusing and/or Stupid to Me”
One interesting and occasionally frustrating part of the English language involves words that sound exactly the same but are spelled differently and have different meanings.
These words are homophones and according to the people over there, they’re their favorite types of words.
Personally I’d like to carve these words into stone, but would wood be better? I recently noticed that one family of words seems to have won the homophones championship, and I asked myself, “Is this something people want to know? No or yes?” Continue reading “Ore or oar? A family of words with the same sounds but different spellings”
I often hear people say that a decision is a no-brainer, meaning it is relatively simple choice.
That’s fine, but by the same logic I think we should say that a decision that requires some thought is a “brainer.”
“I am not sure what type of bread to buy; this sure is a brainer,” one might say, since bread purchasing is a difficult task. Continue reading “This post about no-words like no-brainer and no-doubter is a no-thinker”
Holidays can be very enjoyable, but they can also be extremely confusing.
It’s wonderful to honor parents, heroes, fools and plenty of other people with these special days, but the lack of clarity about how to spell the names and whether or not to use apostrophes drives me crazy. Continue reading “If we had a holiday to celebrate punctuation marks, would it be Apostrophe’s Day or Apostrophes Day?”
While many people take the word “take” for granted, it is a surprisingly complex and confusing word that requires you to take great care.
For example, did you know that take is both a verb and a noun?
Did you also know that people constantly are using the word incorrectly?
And finally, can you believe that most people don’t thank me when I correct them?
All in all, these discussions require a lot of give-and-take, so I will give you my take on take. Continue reading “You can take your take anywhere, but you can’t take it here”
Some days I say to myself, I hope that someday I will never see anyone use any one of these compound words or phrases incorrectly anymore.
At the very least, I hope that I don’t see these mistakes any more than I already do. Continue reading “Everyday words and phrases are mistaken every day”
Are you ever unsure if you should insure, ensure or assure?
This happens to me often, which causes me great displeasure. In order to bring closure to the issue, though, I am offering a few simple rules: Continue reading “Insure and ensure ensure displeasure”
While not helping any of the children with their homework this week, I realized that I was pretty lost on most of the words in their vocabulary list.
And while I was definitely not helping them, I looked up several of the definitions and found that many of them seemed to fit with a familiar story. So, in order to help improve my vocabulary and hopefully get an A on some English homework, I present to you this classic Christmas story filled with the words in bold from two recent high school vocabulary lists.
Continue reading “A cursory Christmas tale of a reviled parsimonious old man who recanted”
Today, I literally heard people say the word “like” too often and in response I figuratively yelled, “Stop it” because I disliked it so much.
Like is magical word that can be a preposition, conjunction, noun, adjective or adverb. It is not, however, just a fill in word to be thrown in anywhere in a sentence for no apparent reason.
Continue reading “It’s fine to like like, but not it’s not like literally fine”
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